Tag Archives: Alexander Hamilton

If Hamilton seems an unlikely subject for a musical, keep in mind that this isn’t the first time somebody has set the Founders to music and put them on a stage. One of the all-time best films about the Revolution originated as a Broadway show.

The first time I saw the movie version of 1776, it was totally by accident. This was back when I was a teenager, before I’d developed any kind of serious interest in history. In the summer I used to stay up to watch Letterman and the other talk shows, and then I’d flip through the channels for a while before dozing off. One night (or in the wee hours of the morning, I suppose) I happened to land on a movie channel right before 1776 came on.

Next thing I knew the stodgy figures from all those old paintings were alive—bickering about the heat, swapping insults, longing for their wives, and occasionally bursting out in song. It humanized the Founders without diminishing their achievement, it was hilarious without trivializing the events it depicted, and it somehow made the unfolding of history seem contingent and uncertain.

I don’t know why I got such a kick out of it; I wasn’t a fan of American history or musicals at the time. But now that I look back, seeing that movie was one of the things that got me interested in the American Revolution. Seeing 1776 didn’t turn me into a history nut overnight, but it was definitely a step along the road to where I am now. Maybe if I’d been in the habit of going to bed at a decent hour, I’d be in a different line of work.

On a related note, the Spanish version of Evita with Paloma San Basilio is so good it’ll knock you right on your keister.

I didn’t really start taking the Gettysburg Address seriously until one day when I was in grad school, trying to figure out how to finish a paper while eating a roast beef sandwich. I was enrolled in a seminar on the early national period, and my professor had told us to write an essay answering the following question: Who was more prescient, Alexander Hamilton or Thomas Jefferson? Of these two men who had very different visions of what America should be, which one saw the country’s future direction more clearly?

My instinct was to go with Hamilton. In terms of policy, he was probably the most forward-looking of all the Founders, envisioning a United States with a vigorous, centralized government and a modern, diversified economy. The overall course of American history has been in this direction, especially since the late nineteenth century.

At the same time, in terms of ideology and values—what Americans have believed about themselves and their country, and what they have wanted to believe about their role in the world—Jefferson casts a long shadow. If the overall trend of the operation of government and economics has been Hamiltonian, Jefferson’s ideals have been the ones espoused most frequently. In fact, it’s in terms of equality that Hamilton and the other Federalists look most antiquated, committed as they were to older ideas about elitism and deference. ”America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed,” according to G.K. Chesterton. ”That creed is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in The Declaration of Independence….It enunciates that all men are equal in their claim to justice, that governments exist to give them that justice, and that their authority is for that reason just.”

A rare photograph of Lincoln at the Gettysburg dedication ceremony on Nov. 19, 1863. (Wikimedia Commons)

I knew that I’d probably end up hedging a little, noting that while Hamilton was more prescient in terms of the way America has operated, Jefferson was more influential in terms of Americans’ self-definition. But that answer seemed a little wishy-washy. I wanted to come up with some sort of definitive answer.

So I was sitting at an Arby’s restaurant, trying to knock out an outline for the paper while getting a bite to eat, when I figured out how to give both Hamilton and Jefferson their due. Neither man was totally correct. It was Abraham Lincoln who understood America most clearly, because at Gettysburg he reconciled these two different visions of the nation so that each one supported the other. Lincoln oversaw a Hamiltonian war—a war of national consolidation, and a war that would result in a more commercial nation with a more vigorous central government—but he did it to achieve Jeffersonian ends. Indeed, he did it while invoking Jefferson, chapter and verse.

In his Gettysburg Address, Lincoln tied the birth of America to the promise of liberty and Jefferson’s 1776 “proposition” that all men are created equal. ”The principles of Jefferson are the definitions and axioms of free society,” he had claimed shortly before his presidency. Lincoln praised Jefferson because his Declaration of Independence did not merely justify the Revolution. Jefferson had used that document to set down “an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.”

In 1863, the American experiment to work out this “abstract truth”—an experiment only “four score and seven years” old—would either survive and vindicate government of the people, or it would collapse and call the whole enterprise of popular government into question. If a minority could dissolve the Union due to the outcome of an election, democracy by majority rule was unworkable. To Lincoln, secession was therefore an existential threat to democratic government itself. The stakes in the Civil War were breathtakingly high. The survival of popular government was what the men buried at Gettysburg had given “the last full measure of devotion” to defend.

Lincoln thus believed that the Hamiltonian tools of a consolidated Union and an active national government were necessary to secure the Jeffersonian principles of liberty and equality. These tools would also be the means to extend these Jeffersonian ideals to the enslaved. The war would not only secure what the Founders had gained, but finish what they had left undone by resolving the great American contradiction of slavery in a nation dedicated to freedom.

Rather than merely dedicating a cemetery, Lincoln explained the meaning of America, defined the purpose of the war, paid tribute to the dead, exhorted his audience to continue their struggle on behalf of freedom, and reconciled the two seemingly contradictory American impulses of Union and liberty. And he did it in less than three hundred words.

We didn’t focus as strictly on historic sites in New York as we did in Boston, but we did manage to do a little heritage touring on our last day in the Big Apple. We made a point of visiting Federal Hall National Memorial on Wall Street, site of the nation’s first Capitol and George Washington’s first inauguration. The original building is gone, but today an impressive classical structure and a statue of Washington mark the spot.

Inside the building is an exhibit on the trial of colonial printer John Peter Zenger, arrested for publishing articles critical of New York’s royal governor. Zenger’s 1735 trial for seditious libel in the original Federal Hall—at that time it was New York’s City Hall—proved to be a landmark case in the history of freedom of the press. His lawyer argued that demonstrably factual statements cannot be considered libelous, the jury agreed, and Zenger walked away a free man.

You’ll also find Washington’s inaugural Bible inside, on loan from St. John’s Lodge…

…and the stone on which he stood while taking the oath of office.

After the inaugural ceremony, Washington attended a service at nearby St. Paul’s Chapel. He continued to worship there while the capital remained in New York, and you can still see his pew, right underneath an oil painting of the Great Seal of the U.S.

On the east side of the church is a memorial to Gen. Richard Montgomery, killed while leading the attack on Quebec at the end of 1775. Montgomery’s remains were moved to St. Paul’s with a great deal of fanfare in 1818.

Unlike its mother church, St. Paul’s Chapel made it through the great New York fire of ’76 and is now the oldest church building in the city. In fact, surviving catastrophes has been something of a hallmark of St. Paul’s. It’s right next to the World Trade Center site, but miraculously came through the 9/11 attacks without any major damage. Visitors left thousands of stuffed animals, flowers, cards, and other memorials around the church after the attacks, and some of these mementoes are on exhibit inside the sanctuary. (You can see a few of them in the photo of Washington’s pew.) Emergency personnel working at the WTC site stayed at St. Paul’s during the recovery effort. And the building is still there, a dozen years after that awful September morning and more than two centuries since Washington stepped inside on the very day American government opened for business.